Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain...

Loss has no friend, no allies, no benefit to the human spirit.

Secure attachment has been linked to a child’s ability to successfully recover and prove resilient in the presence of a traumatic event.

Trauma does not have to occur by abuse alone…

Resiliency is the essence of a global positive framework…

Resiliency is not gender-, age-, or intellectually specific…

Trauma can have a masking effect.

It’s very important the toilet be beautiful, that this stage is reflected. If a child suffers trauma, then he will have adult neuroses.

Resiliency is the body’s internal response to a stressful situation.

Boundaries are, in simple terms, the recognition of personal space.

Attachment. A secure attachment is the ability to bond; to develop a secure and safe base; an unbreakable or perceivable inability to shatter to bond between primary parental caregiver(s) and child; a quest for familiarity;...

Childhood trauma does not come in one single package.

We don’t heal in isolation, but in community.

I became skilled at covering my tracks, filling in the blanks. Sometimes the blanks were never filled. At other times, I would recall places where I had been or things I had done as if...

The process of dissociation is an elegant mechanism built into the human psychological system as a form of escape from (sometimes literally) going crazy. The problem with checking out so thoroughly is that it can...

It doesn’t take two minutes on an examining table for a girl to know that abortion is painful and destructive and it’ll have far-reaching effects on her life. Besides the emotional trauma of going through...

Her voice was flat, in a way Myrna recognized from years of listening to people trying to rein in their emotions. To squash them down, flatten, them, and with them their words and their voices....

There are edges around the black and every now and then a flash of color streaks out of the gray. But I can never really grasp any of the slivers of memories that emerge.

The ruling classes use broken and smashed up childhoods as weaponised instruments of domination around the world. This is why the government has no incentive to end child abuse; because the government needs abuse victims...

I’m back in the basement of the Ascension Catholic Church, Francisco. And Little Suzie is here. She’s lying on an alter, and they’re hurting her. The bastards. They’re hurting her. There is blood all over...

So, what role does memory play in the understanding and treatment of trauma? There is a form of implicit memory that is profoundly unconscious and forms the basis for the imprint trauma leaves on the...

front person” for the system.

Surprisingly, it is often when wandering through the emotional carnage left by the worst of humankind that we find the best of humanity ad well.

As an undergraduate student in psychology, I was taught that multiple personalities were a very rare and bizarre disorder. That is all that I was taught on … It soon became apparent that what I...

The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world...

It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you...

As Lynn began getting psychologically better, she took me to a variety of sites. She taught me how to read trail markers. In the end, Lynn’s stories could not be denied. She was not only...

The acknowledgement of having suffered evil is the greatest step forward in mental health.

There comes a time when something changes you… No matter the impact… Where the world no longer beats in time with you. You no longer feel amongst the fray.. And the feeling of loneliness is...

we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay…, from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from...

Prison left me with some strange little tics.’ She has taken all the door off their hinges in all the apartments she has lived in since. It’s not that she has anxiety attacks about small...

I don’t know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff...

…Things happenedwhen you were little. Things youdon’t remember now, and don’t wantto. But they need to escape,need to worm their way outof that dark place in your brainwhere you keep them stashed.

A bad thing happened to you kids, Dad said. But it could have been worse.So much worse, Mom said.But because of you kids, Dad said, it wasn’t.You did so good, Mom said.Did beautiful, Dad said.

The surgical resident interested in learning trauma will bypass a residency at a quiet community hospital for a residency at a fast-paced Level 1 trauma center treating a high volume of trauma patients. A Level...

I won’t let that night ruin you forever.” But it did, it broke me into a million pieces and blew them away in the wind, like crumbled leaves.

Deep connection is the antidote to madness.

Parts of you are phobic of anger and generally terrified and ashamed of angry dissociative parts. There is often tremendous conflict between anger-avoidant and anger-fixated parts of an individual. Thus, an internal and perpetual cycle...

Rape is so particularly traumatic and so meaningful in so many ways, that there’s something about using the word in other contexts that diminishes the reality of it, and the impact it has on women’s...

When I ask you who you are, you’d better say my fucking name.

Lewis’s mental map of reality had difficulty accommodating the trauma of the Great War. Like so many, he found the settled way of looking at the world, taken for granted by many in the Edwardian...

He remembered the old-timers from his navy days. Grizzled lifers who could soundly sleep while two meters away their shipmates played a raucous game of poker or watched the vids with the volume all the...

Trauma is personal.

Beliefs are physical. A thought held long enough and repeated enough becomes a belief. The belief then becomes biology.

i see the sky as beautiful, Regardless of its shine Because I wake each day grateful, That I get another chance to be alive.

All mental unhappiness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

What I wanted was to get away. But the moon was too far beyond, and there were white bits under me, where the flesh was shredded off and the bone gleamed that famed ivory, and...

Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.

We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories...

To tell a woman who has suffered through the trauma of rape or an incident of incest and who has been impregnated that she can’t terminate her pregnancy because she has not reported it in...